Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Summary
Humbert Humbert, a middle aged literature professor obsessed since adolescence with what he calls nymphets, rents a room from widow Charlotte Haze largely to be near her twelve year old daughter Dolores, whom he privately calls Lolita. He marries Charlotte to stay close to the girl; when Charlotte discovers his diary and is killed by a car moments after running from the house in shock, Humbert becomes Dolores's sole guardian and spends the next two years driving her across a long string of American motels, raping her repeatedly while disguising the abuse to hotel clerks and teachers as an affectionate father daughter trip. Dolores eventually escapes with the playwright Clare Quilty, another man who has been grooming her, and Humbert spends years searching for her before finding her, at seventeen, married, pregnant and living in poverty under a different name; she refuses to leave with him, and he gives her what money he has before tracking down and shooting Quilty to death. Humbert is arrested and dies in prison of heart failure while awaiting trial, and a brief postscript from the fictional editor of his manuscript reveals that Dolores died giving birth to a stillborn daughter on Christmas Day the same year.
Nabokov gives the entire story to Humbert's own voice, elaborate, funny, self justifying and openly manipulative of the reader's sympathy, and the book reads as a sustained argument between its dazzling sentences and the horror of what those sentences are describing; Nabokov never lets Humbert's eloquence actually excuse him, but the gap between the two is exactly what has made the novel so uncomfortable, and so debated, for seventy years.
Nabokov wrote the book in secret over roughly five years while teaching at Cornell, at one point carrying draft pages out to burn them before his wife Vera talked him out of it, and he said the idea began years earlier with a newspaper account of an ape at a Paris zoo that, given the first drawing tools ever offered to an animal, sketched only the bars of its own cage.
Historical Context & Significance
Every major American publisher Nabokov approached, including Viking, Simon and Schuster and Doubleday, turned the manuscript down, and it was finally the Olympia Press in Paris, a house better known for pulp erotica, that published Lolita in September 1955. Graham Greene named it one of the three best books of 1955 in the Sunday Times, which provoked the Sunday Express's editor John Gordon to call it the filthiest book he had ever read and sheer unrestrained pornography in return, a public argument that did more than any advertising could have to make the book famous. British customs seized copies in 1956 and France banned it outright for two years from December of that year; the American edition did reach the finalist list of the 1959 National Book Award for Fiction, which went instead to Bernard Malamud's The Magic Barrel.
G. P. Putnam's American edition in 1958 sold 100,000 copies in three weeks, the fastest any book had done that since Gone with the Wind, and by 2005 the novel had sold an estimated fifty million copies worldwide. Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film and Adrian Lyne's 1997 version both had to soften or obscure Dolores's age to reach audiences at all, and the word Lolita itself has drifted so far into general use, shorthand for any sexualized young girl, that it now obscures the novel's own clear verdict on Humbert as a rapist and a liar.